The Last King of the Britons
by Queen Gwenhwyfar
Summary: "History is written by those who have frightened their dissidents into silence, and Arthur, the last king of the Britons, was one of those victors. Who am I to speak such an insult? I am Arthur's queen, whom the bards say was unfaithful to him and, by way of adultery, brought about his fall. The bards are gifted storytellers, but only because they lie, and I, too, can tell a tale."
1. Grainne Speaks

_**Grainne Speaks:**_

_When I was a child, there was a pathway made of cobbles that ran along the river near my mother's house in Cornwall. I only went there once, and what I found frightened me so much that I could never return. There was a maiden in the water, with long red hair and skin as pale as a stormy sky, who was kneeling near the riverbank. She was scrubbing at a fine red tunic that belonged to my mother. I thought that she must have stolen it, and became afraid of her, and she must've sensed my fear, for she turned to look at me and I saw then that her eyes were the colour of blood. There were streaks of tears upon her face, and my fear of her was turned into pity. I called to her, but she was silent and dropped the tunic into the water. She turned from me and walked deeper into the river._

_I thought she meant to drown herself, perhaps out of shame for having stolen from my mother, and so I ran to find help. The first person that I found was my nurse, Gwenfrewy, and she told me what I'd seen was the fairy that the northern people call the banshee. That evening_, _Gwenfrewy came to me as I lay awake in my cot and told me that one of the other servants had found my mother floating in the river with a bright red tunic caught in the reeds beside her body. Her eyes were open and coloured red, as if she had been weeping. Several weeks later, a messenger arrived from my father. He told us that my father had died upon the battlefield, but he came too late. My mother had already known._


	2. The Daughter of a Queen

Scarce was the waking moment that Gwenfrewy, a maid to the Lady Gwen of the Summer Country, did not seethe with anger. Of all of the servants who had tended to the Lady, Gwenfrewy had been her favourite, and, for that reason, she had become the nurse to Gwen's three daughters. Only the eldest, Grainne, had ever known her mother, who had never loved anyone except for a man who had never loved any woman.

Gwenfrewy looked from the two babes that she held, suckling at her breast, to their older sister, and was relieved to think that the twins would never know the abandonment that Grainne now felt from the woman who had chosen death over her children - or could she ever have claimed that they were hers? After all, she had never known them. She'd never nursed them or cared for them as anything other than a burden to the husband who'd only wanted a son to train into a warrior who could succeed him, and put his wife away when she'd failed to make such a crowning achievement. And she, the weak woman that she was, spent the rest of her life mourning for the lover that was never hers. Why, then, should his daughters be hers?

It matters not anymore, Gwenfrewy sighed. The Lady was dead by her own will, and Grainne was only five years old, but, even yet, the people of this country were crying out for their rightful Queen. They said that Gwen had been stolen from them when she chose to marry to a man of the north. A Queen of the Summer Country is forbidden to wed with an outsider, and one who does is exiled, and her children with her. But Gwen was her mother's only daughter, and her mother was her mother's only daughter, and so forth. In so many generations, only the exiled daughter had borne more than a single female child, and those girls could never claim the crown that their mother had thrown away, but neither could they claim their daughters as their own. Their daughters would be princesses, and a princess belongs to no one but her Goddess.

Gwenfrewy's thoughts were broken when Grainne came over from the window, where the girl had been watching the road, as she was wont to do whenever Gwenfrewy was occupied with her sisters. She was a solemn-faced child and the mirror of her mother in every way, but with reddish fair hair in place of the Lady's shining black locks, and her milky white face was speckled all over with delicate brown spots. She gazed at the twins with pale green eyes and turned to Gwenfrewy with the same pleading look that she'd worn on her face when she'd come to beg for help, and Gwenfrewy had lied to her.

"Mother is here," said Grainne.

Gwenfrewy frowned, but she decided not to correct the girl. Gwen was dead and Grainne knew. She did not need a reminder of that fact, deny it though she may, but Grainne continued.

"She knows that you're angry," Grainne was looking directly into Gwenfrewy's eyes. "And she's sorry she can't tell you that she's sorry."

Those were the last words that Gwenfrewy heard. She didn't know that she'd dropped the twins on the floor. She didn't hear their screams, or their sister's as she tried to break their fall. When the other servants found her, she was staring at the window as if some ghastly abomination had tried to enter the bedchamber, but Grainne insisted that there was nothing there except for her mother. They dismissed her words as those of a grieving child still in denial over her mother's passing, and took pity on her, for, just then, she'd lost her nurse and sisters as well.


	3. Anu's Chosen

Grainne, the exiled daughter of Prince Amlawd, stood at her bedroom window that overlooked the forest behind her house. Her eyes fell, once more, upon the stone path that led down to the river, where the maidservants still went everyday to wash their household's laundry. For ten years, she had diligently watched that road at dusk and dawn, in wait for this fated day. For now, she was still forbidden to step foot in the Summer Country, but the people of that island still claimed her as their Lady, and, soon, a son of their royal house would come here to claim her for his bride, so that she'd be a princess, as she should have been when she was born.

She knew not whom she would marry, and, in truth, she did not care. A princess of the Summer Country had to wed a man of the Summer Tribes in order to give their people a warlord who would lead their men in battle, but she would always be free to take whatever lovers she pleased, in order to conceive a female heir who would succeed her as Queen. She knew, however, that her intended, a man of the Western Summer Tribes, was twice as old as she, and a widower whose first wife, the Lady Gwendolyn of the Eastern Tribes, had died from battle in the previous year.

_And I will never see this place again_, she thought to herself. Once she was a princess, she would be forbidden to leave the Isle of Summer, and, since no outsider was permitted on the island, no one in this household would accompany her to her new home. It was all just as well to her, since there was no one here who was her friend. Her servants were all women, who had thought her strange as a little girl, and were still afraid of her now. In ten years, she had grown into a striking maiden with a willowy frame and copper-coloured hair, and her eyes had turned an even paler shade of green with specks of gold and grey in her irises. The people in this village called her beautiful, but also terrible, and, in truth, she frightened herself as much as she terrified the people around her.

One year after Gwenfrewy's death, the old nurse had come to the child Grainne while she lay awake in her bed and told the young girl that the Goddess Don, whom the Irish call _Anu_, had given Grainne the powers of true sight, and this was how Grainne was able to see through the veil that separated the two worlds of the living and dead. The Goddess wished to assume mortal form as the daughter of a human woman, and Anu had chosen Grainne to bear the child, who was to be her firstborn daughter.

Naturally, the young Grainne had been frightened, then, for all of her encounters with spirits had signalled the death of someone near to her, and surely, she was next. Yet, after Gwenfrewy left, Grainne never saw another spirit again, and this was dismaying as much as it was surprising. She'd tried to write off her experiences but, as she'd grown older, her thoughts had turned toward her destiny, as the only living daughter of the Royal Summer House, to become the Summer Queen, whose birth is in May and whose nature is to be born again in every year, along with the earth that is her body, until she dies and her daughter takes her place. Yes, she would be the May Queen for this generation of her people, and their next Queen would be none other than the Goddess herself!

"Come, milady." The door opened and a brown-haired maid, whose wrinkled face betrayed many years of hard physical labour, entered. "The Lord Rica of the Eastern Summer Country has arrived to take you for his bride."

Grainne silently bowed her head in acknowledgement and exited through the open door while the maid held it open for her, not once looking back toward the window. Never again would she watch the world through that window; she was free from this house where she had been imprisoned for almost all of her life! Grainne tried to hide her excitement as she walked slowly down the stairway and hoped that she hadn't forgotten how to pronounce her bridegroom's name.


End file.
